anarchism, AnthropologyComments Off on People Without Government. An Anthropology of Anarchism by Harold Barclay – Preface by Alex Comfort. eBook £1.50 (see eBookshelf)

Apr162013

People Without Government. An Anthropology of Anarchism, Harold Barclay (Preface by Alex Comfort) (ISBN 978-0-904564-47-1). First published by Cienfuegos Press, Over the Water, Sanday, Orkney, in 1982. This fully revised ChristieBooks ( eBook) edition published 2013.

Anarchy, as the absence of government, is neither chaos nor some impossible Utopian dream. In fact it is a very common form of political organisation and one that has characterised much of the human past. People Without Government describes briefly the anarchic political structures of a number of these societies. True they are mainly small-scale hunting, gathering and horticultural groups. However, the social organisation of certain large populations with complex relations is also sometimes anarchic. Thus anarchy applies to a broad spectrum of different kinds of societies.

Isaac Deutscher’s lecture “On Socialist Man” was given to the second annual Socialist Scholars Conference held at the Hotel Commodore, New York, on September 9-11, 1966. Deutscher had come from London as the principal invited guest at the conference. This reply to Deutscher’s address by Romanian-American anarchist writer Marcus Graham deals, in particular, with the Minutes of the First International and the sabotaging of the Hague Congress by the Marx clique.

Marcus Graham (1893-1985) lived most of his early life in the semi-clandestine world where many fighters for freedom have occasion to find themselves. He contributed to several anarchist papers before launching, in January 1933, MAN!, the organ of the International Group in San Francisco, an important link between different strands of the North American anarchist movement. In its pages Graham published articles covering the whole spectrum of anarchist thought, the politics of Roosevelt’s America, crime, fascism, religion, resistance, art, poetry, literature and anarchist profiles — a real snapshot of life and anarchism throughout most of the Thirties. MAN! continued to be published, despite police and state harassment, until its forced closure by the US government in April 1940.

anarchism, Anarchism in the USA, Biography, class warComments Off on FRAGMENTS: a memoir by Sam Dolgoff. Personal recollections drawn from a lifetime of struggle in the cause of anarchism. Now available as a Kindle (eBook) at €3,21; £2.58; $4.13

Sep162012

SAM DOLGOFF, retired house painter, editor and translator of Bakunin on Anarchy, The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-management in the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939), was 83 years old when he completed this Memoir. He started out in life, more than half a century earlier, as a working hobo on the railroads and waterfronts, in lumber camps, canneries, and steel mills of the United States. Caught up early in ideas of radical social change, he moved from reformist socialism to anarchism, publishing his first piece, a criticism of Gandhi, in the anarchist journal Road to Freedom. As a member of the IWW he became a strong propagandist for libertarian labor movements—incidentally teaching himself to read six different languages—lecturing across America in union halls, civic centers and colleges. Under the pen name Sam Weiner, he published innumerable articles in labor and anarchist periodicals, many of which he helped to found and edit.

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary